[HN Gopher] How can you not be romantic about programming?
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How can you not be romantic about programming?
Author : joubert
Score : 277 points
Date : 2021-02-20 19:16 UTC (3 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (thorstenball.com)
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| This is basically why I quit doing it for money. It felt like
| taking this amazing, yes, romantic, thing, and perverting it
| until it is barely recognizable. Writing code that I knew from
| the onset would never last more than a year or two, would not see
| the light of day beyond inside its small nook. And in the end, we
| accomplished little more than moving money around and persuading
| other humans into doing things which were bad for them.
|
| It took me several years to get over the numbness I developed
| after years of that crap, but now I'm in love again.
| jrowen wrote:
| Something I sometimes think about in this vein: how many lines of
| code, written by how many people, in how many different times and
| places, are traversed on your computer every second?
|
| It's kind of mind-blowing to me, and I can't think of anything
| else that works like that. It would be like if, when building a
| new house, you built it around an existing house, and continued
| to add layer after layer, and generations later the original
| house was still in constant use and supporting all the rest.
| celim307 wrote:
| The highways of tomorrow are being built today.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I wrote my first lines of code when I was 12, so I had a good few
| years of working exclusively on stuff I was interested in before
| I went to college and found employment in this field after
| graduating.
|
| My current job is nothing like those years and in comparison
| feels like bricklaying. It pays the bills, but there isn't a lot
| of room for growth, because we have a streamlined process
| designed for delivering the product on time and on budget.
|
| In one word - boring.
|
| On one side this is great - you should use boring technology,
| because it brings the most value. On the other it's as devoid of
| romanticism as it can be.
|
| The silver lining here is that this job leaves me with enough
| mental energy to pursue hobby projects. Provided that at the
| moment I'm not in a situation in which I'm forced to follow
| rules/directions I consider harmful/stupid.
| 7usueudud wrote:
| I never know how to answer coworkers when they ask what motivates
| me because, frankly, I think all the romanticism is just a
| childish fad that you have to play along with if you want people
| to assume the best of you. My usual answer is always something
| vague like "there's just something magical about them. I feel
| like an artificer." It wouldn't be so annoying but I constantly
| meet people who insist they just can't work that day because they
| don't have whatever synonym they've chosen for inspiration and
| meanwhile all I can think is "Or you could get over it and finish
| like a god damn professional". As a very mercenary person who's
| happy to hone a skill simply for the money I can't wait until
| there's enough people in software that we can start firing the
| profitable children finally.
|
| I think this is just an American thing though because on the
| occasions I've met with partners from other countries, especially
| basically anywhere in SEA, I've noticed people act a lot more
| like adults. Personally I blame San Fransisco.
| picks_at_nits wrote:
| I am deeply, deeply romantic about programming. I consider it an
| act of self-actualization.
|
| But answering the question literally, I am not representative of
| everyone in the industry, and that's a good thing. It's easy to
| feel romantic about your vocation when you have a number of
| reasonable options for achieving modest financial security, and
| you thus had the privilege of choosing the one that most closely
| matched your idea of self-actualization and self-identification.
|
| Not everyone in this economy has the same set of choices. For
| many, programming is the lowest-risk way to put a roof over their
| head and feed their family. We can make up little myths about how
| we romantics are obviously more passionate, work harder because
| it's our dream, are more deeply engaged, and so on.
|
| But in the end, I think we'll find as we look around that those
| of us who feel romantic about something that is also an excellent
| way to make money at this particular place in time and space have
| won a lottery of sorts, and are definitely in the minority.
|
| That's not a bad thing.
| sombremesa wrote:
| > For many, programming is the lowest-risk way to put a roof
| over their head and feed their family.
|
| It seems that to some extent the romantics are actually
| indebted to this cohort for pushing forth the ideas of fair
| compensation and fighting for workers' rights, because people
| who are passionate about their work usually end up getting
| taken advantage of.
| xmprt wrote:
| Game Development is an example of what can happen when there
| are too many people passionate about their work. I'm not
| saying that everyone in that industry is taken advantage of
| but it's a lot more than the broader tech industry even
| though there's a lot of overlap between skill sets.
| picks_at_nits wrote:
| My own writing on the subject of this industry falls into two
| pretty cleanly divided piles:
|
| The writing about programming itself is "impractical" and
| "romantic," because that writing is for those who have an
| affinity with the "romance of programming."
|
| The writing about getting a job, negotiating compensation,
| shipping products, hiring programmers, &c. is practical,
| because that writing is for everyone.
| kulig wrote:
| I learned this the hard way. Thought I was special and
| passionate and hard working. Then I had a mental breakdown and
| could barely get anything done. All of a sudden money became
| the top priority I started seeing the world for what it really
| is.
| goalieca wrote:
| > We can make up little myths about how we romantics are
| obviously more passionate, work harder because it's our dream,
| are more deeply engaged, and so on.
|
| This comment stuck out for me. There's no shortage of people
| who "love their job" who aren't actually good at their job.
| They can be very motivated to do the wrong thing and often have
| unearned egos.
| rektide wrote:
| I agree with your caution, I disagree largely with your
| reasons/the dangers you identify. I've avoided California, so
| maybe that has an impact, but I almost never have seen ego as
| a problem. I'm one of the only ones who will do impractical
| things sometimes (but just as often my crazy ideas are
| radically simpler).
|
| My gut feel is that romantics have it the hardest. They are
| way more in touch with the potential & powers of it all, the
| overwhelming awesomeness that is everywhere, & how un-tapped,
| un-actualized the world-actual about them is. I don't have
| particular links, alas, but I think of MrDoob, author of the
| much loved Three.js library which has the lion's share of 3D
| on the web. He seems clearly to be engaged, to be interested,
| but he also has talked to himself not being great employee-
| material, suffering problems of motivation.
|
| The really romantics have problems of alignment. There are
| few situations in the world where the passion is allowed to
| flow. There are few working environments that support the
| chaotic workflow & passion-driven-development. Agile: we all
| practice agile. What is agile but a way to insure consistent
| steady endless sprints, each slowly optimizing productivity?
| What an evil anethema, a plague upon those of us who work by
| our muses. The corporation, the industry, wants worker bees.
| And for many years that's probably a good way to function,
| probably a valuable personal development, of fitting in,
| declaring what you are working on, learning how to tackle
| problems. But in the long game, I think this mode of software
| development is a joke, is consistently low-ambition,
| squanders the immense potential we have. And I don't think
| you need long deep experience & talent to be squandered.
| rektide wrote:
| > But answering the question literally, I am not representative
| of everyone in the industry,
|
| I am deeply /deeply/ romantic about programming, but industry
| is dreck. Unimaginative, low potential, sapping, low-ambition,
| filled with endless middle- & low-roads & compromises.
| Countless stakeholders, endless non-technical-personals to
| "reason" with. Plans & designs & endless corporate aligning &
| planning. All for middling corporate plans, faint progress,
| carried forward under the weight of countless legacy systems &
| terrible decisions.
|
| Programming & open source is this limitless potential, this
| endless imagineering & exploration. We are unencumbered by
| anything beyond what we might imagine, what we might want to
| do, free to think of how we want to represent, structure,
| develop things.
|
| Not everyone is into programming for the same reasons. But I
| find increasing distance, increasing inability to articulate to
| others how amazing being a programmer is, what expressiveness &
| power we have, how unencumbered & free we are. Even if others
| don't share the ambition & sense of grandiosity, don't feel the
| immense pull of the vast humanistic work that we distinctly are
| the crafters & doers of, there's still such power to create &
| share & inform that is so rewarding, so immense, so imminent in
| the craft, & I deeply deeply crave seeing some recognition,
| somewhere, of some of it- of themselves!- at some level, in my
| fellow peers. It's ok if we have different reasons, different
| motivations, different engagements, but there is a might of
| human potential here that programmers are so uniquely connected
| to, so immersed in, and I want these fish to realize the water
| about them, even if they only aspire to be small fish.
|
| I affirm strongly the question: how indeed can you not be
| romantic about programming?
| DC1350 wrote:
| > I affirm strongly the question: how indeed can you not be
| romantic about programming?
|
| It's boring and people only do it because they're too
| socially unsuccessful to participate in things that are
| actually fun, so they convince themselves spending hundreds
| of hours making boring stuff is actually a good use of their
| time. I understand that some programming is great, but since
| 99% of all software is not interesting, I don't believe the
| amount of people who say they love it.
|
| I've met people who try to make me think they're passionate
| about building file management, customer service, or payroll
| applications and I just don't believe it.
| mckirk wrote:
| That seems like a harsh view. A lot of software isn't very
| glamorous or exciting at first glance, that's true. But if
| you're sufficiently intrigued by logic puzzles and the
| challenge of solving things elegantly, my guess is that
| even the most boring piece of software has some opportunity
| for fun buried in its architecture.
|
| But since you don't seem to be able to relate that too
| much, maybe you are just motivated by other things than
| many programmers. What would be the 'actual fun' things
| then in your opinion, that you have to be 'socially
| successful' to participate in?
| vinger wrote:
| Making a file manager sounds interesting. A customer
| service platform not so much because I've done it before. A
| payroll system could be interesting.
|
| Typing a letter and having it show up interests me.
| What interests you?
| Delk wrote:
| Some people just have great interest in a narrow area.
|
| I agree that most of those types of applications have a
| very low interest-to-drudgery ratio just in general, and I
| personally don't find them interesting at all. But let's
| not forget that some people just have interest in the
| details of things that most other people don't really care
| about. Some of that work might not even be objectively that
| technically demanding, yet it somehow catches the attention
| of some people.
| rektide wrote:
| > It's boring and people only do it because they're too
| socially unsuccessful to participate in things that are
| actually fun,
|
| To throw some bombs the other way, I think there's a legit
| feeling that a lot of the socialization/fun that humanity
| gets up to is frivolous, pointless, dis-engaged,
| solipsistic avoidance of how they are spending their lives.
| We are all engaged in distracting ourselves at some level
| (Terror Management Theory[1]), and while it is popularly
| accepted that being popular & social is how one wins, I
| think there have been a lot of folks who feel other
| callings, to do, to make, to explore, and often it's less
| than clear how to do these activities socially. Einstein
| only found two other people in the world when he made the
| Olympia Academy[1], but that was enough. Other people
| wouldn't call that social fun, but it engaged him, and I
| would judge more earnestly & wholly & to greater joy than
| most people's social fun.
|
| > so they convince themselves spending hundreds of hours
| making boring stuff is actually a good use of their time. I
| understand that some programming is great, but since 99% of
| all software is not interesting, I don't believe the amount
| of people who say they love it.
|
| I'm much more sympathetic to this all. So much of my first
| post was about the split, the difficulty, of doing software
| development from within the confines of the corporate-
| industrial environment.
|
| There are endless fun challenges & explorations to get up
| to (from within those confines). There's so many things
| that feel good about programming, about feeling like one
| has gotten on top of these confounding complex problems, &
| built a secure well structured coherent domain for oneself.
| I think there is fun here, genuine fun, but I also think
| it's distracting & shallow. It's the social gossip of
| software development. Decoupled from what one is doing.
|
| Most software is, alas, built in corporate-industrial
| manner. Most programmers are merely producers, not
| imaginators, not true creators, very much by design of the
| corporate-industrial system, & it's accepted as 99.999%
| hard fact that programmers need the help of other people or
| else they will make horrible software that won't help
| users. Very little software that is written, I would say,
| is written by software. This wraps up into the whole
| corporate-industrial software problem, that software is
| always intent on being product, on consumerization, and I
| strongly feel it's the lack of trust & lack of exploration
| that keeps 99% of software in the not-interesting realm,
| that keeps computers as a whole impervious & uninteresting
| & uncompelling & unknown (the proverbial kids who know a
| couple apps really well but nothing more about computing).
|
| Most of the programmers you meet, who you accuse of not
| being passionate: perhaps you are right. They're having
| fun, but how engaged are they? Are they avoiding the fear
| of death, engaging themselves in industrial fun? Or do they
| really have a passion, see the world truly, have some sense
| of place of it all, & feel a connection to something? Are
| they facing the terror of death earnestly, more genuinely;
| have they advanced beyond the socializing masses? I think
| your doubts are well founded. I think we ought be critical,
| try to keep a cosmic brain view & skepticism, of ourselves
| & our applications.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_Academy
| psyc wrote:
| I don't understand this. You make it sound as if other
| trades and professions are about getting invited to
| parties.
| scsilver wrote:
| Other professions arent as technical, and focus more on
| creating human connections rather than abstract
| connections.
| [deleted]
| andrewflnr wrote:
| While I don't disagree with the article, this quote better sums
| up how I feel about programming.
|
| > The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from
| pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air,
| creating by exertion of the imagination... Yet the program
| construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it
| moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the
| construct itself... The magic of myth and legend has come true in
| our time.
|
| -Fred Brooks, in _The Mythical Man-Month_
|
| In deference to the counterpoints in this thread, a lot of the
| "poetry" we actually encounter seems to have been written by
| Vogons.
| pjmorris wrote:
| I was burned out at a programming job and thinking about
| finding something else to do when I first read this section in
| 'The Mythical Man Month.' It reminded me of the wonder I'd felt
| at first, and that was still in there, and it became part of
| what has kept me hanging around the profession for another 30
| years or so, so far.
| ljm wrote:
| let var i be none
|
| while var i is less than j
|
| i is i plus one
| btschaegg wrote:
| > Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
|
| ;-)
| caust1c wrote:
| I think that's why so many of my peers (including myself) are
| keen on removing ambiguity from code. Code itself should be as
| clear as possible and only able to be interpreted by readers in
| the way it's meant to convey instructions.
|
| However the solutions are where the elegance, creativity and
| poetry should lie.
| henrik_w wrote:
| I love that quoute! The whole "The Joys of the Craft" is well
| worth reading. It also includes:
|
| - The sheer joy of making things
|
| - The pleasure of making things that are useful to other people
|
| - The fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of
| interlocking moving parts, and watching them work in subtle
| cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in
| from the beginning.
|
| - The joy of always learning, which springs from the
| nonrepeating nature of the task
|
| It really captures what I love about programming:
| https://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Yesterday I set up a Django server that exposes some tables
| through an API that's fully queryable and filterable and sortable
| and paginated. And I wired it right into an antd table component
| on a Web app. And the whole thing is just so nicely interactive
| and #%$&ing clean and beautiful and elegant. I felt such joy
| making it.
|
| Then I had a moment of thinking, "wow the CEO and friends are
| going to be blown away."
|
| Until I stood back and realised that a data table isn't novel or
| interesting and they won't even be aware of the underlying
| beauty.
|
| They're still blown away by a lot of what I do, but it's never
| the things that I find truly beautiful and romantic.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think people in every profession would feel like this
| sometimes.
| [deleted]
| rmason wrote:
| If you have multiple startups competing evenly in the same space
| why does one succeed and the others fail? The founders ability to
| execute is paramount. But of equal importance is that one product
| has a little bit of magic. Something that makes the user smile.
| If it was easy every startup would have it.
|
| You might say they all do the same task why spend extra time so
| the user has an incredible experience. Because in my opinion
| that's how you win.
| DC1350 wrote:
| > Something that makes the user smile.
|
| This is not something that actually happens.
| brmgb wrote:
| While I somewhat admire the author feelings, as a direct answer
| to the chosen title, I have to say I don't share them at all. I
| view programming with a mix of indifference and boredom and the
| sad few years I had to do it as a job are easily the less
| fulfilling of my life.
|
| If I had to sum up my feelings regarding programming, I would say
| it is: - a lot of uninteresting busy work; - intellectually
| mostly unchallenging. The few parts that are actually interesting
| are maths and if I wanted to maths I personally find that there
| are more interesting problems to solve in parts of maths not
| related to programming. I don't remember ever feeling any joy
| after completing a piece of software; - extremely isolating; -
| both boring and infuriating to debug when it's needed.
|
| The only positive part was shipping something useful when it was
| finished.
| ericd wrote:
| Maybe the thing you were working on wasn't interesting enough
| to you? If I'm working on something really hard that I think is
| cool, the intermediate steps are a joyful rush when they work
| out. If I'm working on something like pulling data from yet
| another endpoint, not so much. Might be worth looking around
| for problems that actually excite you.
| chubot wrote:
| I felt that way after a few years of programming. I was bad at
| debugging and several other things that would have made my life
| a lot easier. After a decade of programming, I got better at
| it, and started to like it more (even doing it in my spare
| time)
|
| People like things they are good at. To be provocative: if you
| only did it for a few years, you probably weren't that good at
| it. The same can be said for math, playing guitar, etc.
|
| Guitar is a good example. Anyone who has been playing for a
| year or 3 probably knows the drudgery of practicing some chords
| that don't sound like what's on the record, hurting your
| fingers, etc. When you get good at it, the drudgery goes away
| and you're left with fun.
|
| And that's not to say "good" is a fixed target... The
| interesting thing is that once you get to a certain point, you
| can see the infinite world that you haven't explored yet.
|
| If you like math then there is a ton of stuff in programming
| that's mathematical, but you can't get a job in those areas
| until you've mastered the basics.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I agree that people like things they're good at, but a few
| years is far longer than you need to get good at something.
|
| You can easily get to at least the top 10-20th percentile in
| a single year if you dedicate yourself to something.
| bitwise-and wrote:
| Maybe it was what you were working on, maybe it was the act of
| programming itself, maybe it was the company, etc. etc. etc.,
| for the sake of your own happiness I'm glad you're not doing
| that anymore. I for one and becoming more and more fascinated
| by it, despite its (MANY) quirks & decisions that get made
| because of previous bad decisions. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| amelius wrote:
| > a lot of uninteresting busy work; - intellectually mostly
| unchallenging
|
| My guess is that you should have followed your programmer's
| instincts and automated the uninteresting work.
| [deleted]
| elliottkember wrote:
| I think know what happens here. We become disconnected from the
| real-life output of what we do. It becomes abstract. If you're
| like me, you started off making stuff for yourself and it was a
| thrill to put it live and know that people could see it. Now I
| think we all build stuff for others, because that's where the
| real money is.
|
| In short, a hobby turns into a job and stops being fun. But I've
| found ways to bring programming into my hobbies and that's been
| life-changing!
| Havoc wrote:
| In part I'm glad I didn't go into programming for this reason.
| It's a pure hobby pursuit free of the pressures & stress of work.
| I code what I want when I want.
| tinyprojects wrote:
| Really enjoyed this, thanks for sharing!
| A12-B wrote:
| There's a difference between being romantic about solving puzzles
| and creating new and useful tools, and being romantic about the
| drudgery and bugs. I wouldn't call the people who pretend there
| aren't boring parts of programming 'romantics', it's more of a
| delusion. But those people do exist, and I don't trust them.
| paganel wrote:
| I used to be romantic about code, even more than that, and then I
| saw how the code other programmers like me wrote was used for all
| the wrong reasons and suddenly there was no ounce of romanticism
| left in the very idea of coding.
|
| There could be some chance of regaining the lost romanticism if
| we'd throw "collaborative" concoctions like GitHub out of the
| window, if we'd get rid of the very idea of working for any
| FAANG-like company ever again (and to hell with those hellish
| interviews associated with them, too, nobody interviewed Shelley
| or Goethe before they sat down to write their romantic stuff) and
| to top it all it would be best if from now on we'd only write
| code for our own pleasure, maybe add a very short selection of
| friends, too, no more "software is eating the world" and all that
| materialistic and definitely non-romantic nonsense.
| abarrak wrote:
| A friend of mine asked me: "why are taking it seriously and love
| to code? I do it just as routine job". Then, he didn't complete
| his career as programmer and switched to be business analyst.
| atoav wrote:
| This is a good summary of my own feelings on the whole darn
| thing. I also design circuits and the whole thing is just fucking
| magic to be honest. The fact that this works at all is constantly
| baffeling me.
| o_m wrote:
| I used to love programming, but after doing it for some years
| professionally I feel like a lot of people (clients, managers,
| co-workers) look down on it. Like its just a neccessary evil they
| wish they didn't have to deal with. I feel like it is the lowest
| status profession you can have in the tech world.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I feel like it is the lowest status profession you can have
| in the tech world.
|
| QA, Ops, Support, and (in a reversal from a few decades ago)
| Analysis would like to have words with you.
| DC1350 wrote:
| > How can you not be romantic about programming?
|
| Get a job doing boring shit you've already worked on 3 times
| before. Most programming is awful and that's why you get paid so
| much to do it.
| psyc wrote:
| As an indie game programmer, I cast magic spells and speak living
| worlds into existence. Pretty romantic.
|
| As a paid software developer taking tasks and bugs off backlogs,
| justifying everything I do, no autonomy, forbidden to refactor,
| documenting everything, filling out dumb little forms in Jira
| that literally nobody ever sees again, attending meetings, making
| my boss look good, spinning myself in performance reviews, blah,
| blah, no I can't say any of that is particularly poetic.
| bor0 wrote:
| Computation has been and is a huge part of my life, and thanks to
| it I live a decent life with my family. It also helped with self-
| esteem and other similar things.
|
| But love? Love taught me things I couldn't imagine (in a positive
| way).
| dshpala wrote:
| To paraphrase a thing that I read in a book about Tao:
|
| "How can you not be romantic about making iron hooks?"
|
| And I fully agree. You can find beauty and elegance in anything,
| including programming (and I certainly do).
| phabora wrote:
| CRUD.
| drummer wrote:
| The true wizards of today are the AI engineers and scientists.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I would happily write code for free (and do so off-hours, with my
| kids, and for side projects).
|
| I have the luxury of working in a field where my employer pays me
| not because I hate what I'm doing and would rather not do it all,
| but just because they need me to focus on solving _puzzles they
| choose_ instead of puzzles I choose.
| bspammer wrote:
| This about sums it up for me as well. I feel so absurdly lucky
| that what I love to do also pays well.
|
| If programming paid like shit, I don't think I would be able to
| stop myself going down that road anyway, in the same way
| someone who loves painting can't help but paint.
| FrozenVoid wrote:
| the only things i find "romantic" is creative design in macros,
| improving algorithms and low-level bithacks, everything else is
| mostly boring and mundane code monkeying. Programming big
| projects where creativity and design space are stifled must feel
| suffocating and limited: people don't invent new stuff and do
| everything by the book - implementing something just for it to
| work, but not daring to break new territory.
| xwdv wrote:
| How? Writing resource hogging code all day to figure out how to
| best display obtrusive advertisements is a good start.
| einpoklum wrote:
| If you're doing that, then quit. It's not worth it and you'll
| regret having done this. You'll find another job. Hell, you'll
| find another job as a programmer. Don't do this to yourself,
| nor to us.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| Sure, OP will find another job as a programmer. But I am sure
| that their employer will also find another programmer. So
| saying he is doing it to us sounds kind of disingenuous.
| "Hate the game, not the player."
|
| For me, the frustrating part is that our society is set up to
| incentivize value-decreasing behavior like obtrusive
| advertisements, it doesn't add anything yet still makes
| money, unlike things that are essential to the world (mundane
| example: raising children).
| xwdv wrote:
| Nah, the pay is good and worth it IMO. I see it similar to
| being a roughneck on an oil rig or even a coal miner. I make
| no illusions or romanticize the nature of my work.
| DC1350 wrote:
| Most jobs are terrible but they also pay less. I think he's
| making the right choice. If you don't believe in trade offs
| then you're probably being taken advantage of.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Responding to the title, it's easy: get jaded by constantly
| having to fix somebody else's broken stuff and as a bonus never
| get enough time to express your own creativity and implement your
| good ideas.
|
| Rinse and repeat for ~10 years and you'll see how can you not be
| romantic about programming. (I am in the profession for 19
| years.)
|
| I am now looking for ways to retire early. I will hit 41 in a few
| short weeks and I am still the hard-working guy that has zero
| savings but that has been 100% my fault and I am not blaming
| anyone -- I have treated life as yet another lousy job that I can
| half-ass (reference to my younger years). I came to my senses,
| finally, about two years ago, after I received a series of cold
| showers during several interviewing campaigns and have seen how
| capricious the job market is and how completely _RANDOM_ tech
| hiring is.
|
| Since then I am working on investing in relations more than
| anything else, taking some pay cuts for supposed sustained income
| down the line (people who would call me for temporary contracts
| on a regular basis, people calling me to fix their stuff just for
| a few days and for generous one-time fees, people needing the
| occasional technical writing etc.) but if that doesn't work --
| and it likely will not work because I don't seem to be in the
| right circles -- I'll just start applying exclusively to USA
| companies due to the bigger compensation and will just hoard
| money for a few years.
|
| I'll also likely start 3-4 small IT businesses after I fix my
| health; my skills as a programmer and a sysadmin are quite broad
| and I can pull it off alone.
|
| ---
|
| Back on topic, programming is romantic when you are not doing it
| as a paid job, plain and simple. There are people who absolutely
| love their programming work plus the compensation plus their team
| but if they are reading this they should probably start praying
| to whatever gods they believe in that it will last because for at
| least 80% of us it didn't.
|
| I am looking forward to having more free time after I gather some
| savings. I still love programming but the commercial aspect is
| absolutely destroying it for me.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| "After a while, more and more, you'll find yourself in moments of
| awe, stunned by the size and fragility of it all; the mountains
| of work and talent and creativity and foresight and intelligence
| and luck that went into it. And you'll reach for the word "magic"
| because you won't know how else to describe it and then you lean
| back and smile, wondering how someone could not."
|
| I guess I wish I felt like that about programming. But more and
| more, I feel like this:
|
| "You are an expert in all these technologies, and that's a good
| thing, because that expertise let you spend only six hours
| figuring out what went wrong, as opposed to losing your job. You
| now have one extra little fact to tuck away in the millions of
| little facts you have to memorize because so many of the programs
| you depend on are written by dicks and idiots."
|
| -- https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Awe and contempt are basically the same feeling, but with the
| charge flipped. The author is amazed that it works to the
| degree that it does, you're amazed a how things don't work the
| way you want them to.
|
| Such is the power of framing, I guess.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I used to get emotional like this about programming, both the
| awe and the contempt depending on circumstances. Now, after
| 30 years, it's just work. I don't really feel anything about
| it. And that's kind of the way everything is. Nothing is new
| or exciting. I wake up, work, do household stuff, eat, go to
| bed. That's life. Not interesting, not depressing, just
| neutral.
| carlmr wrote:
| >Not interesting, not depressing, just neutral.
|
| The absence of feelings sounds exactly like depression.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Depression is a bit more complex than that though. You
| can be emotionally neutral if you're just not strongly
| affected by what you're doing, it's probably the default
| state if you've done something for a while. I'm
| emotionally neutral when I brush my teeth.
| carlmr wrote:
| True, let me rephrase what I meant then, if everything,
| day in, day out, feels emotionally neutral, that's very
| depressive sounding.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Yeah for sure. Anhedonia (no longer enjoying things you
| used to) is a strongly associated symptom. Of course it
| could just be a rut and you need to shake up your
| routine, introduce some variety, but that's matter of
| severity rather than category.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| But it doesn't seem that way. I'm not unhappy, or
| suicidal, or gloomy about the future. I just don't find
| that anything really feels "new" and therefore nothing
| really seems exciting. It's like if I got that cliche
| question "what are you passionate about" in an interview,
| my answer would be "nothing."
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I think it's fair to not be passionate about programming.
| As long as you have _some_ sort of creative /passion
| outlet.
| phabora wrote:
| Ma, the passion police is at the door again.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| you have 24h to present evidence of sufficient artistic
| hobbies to your local station.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > As long as you have some sort of creative/passion
| outlet
|
| I used to feel that I did, when I was younger. Not really
| these days. But I'm not sad about it.
| carlmr wrote:
| Don't you have the feeling you want something exciting?
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I'll put it this way, I have no real burning desire to do
| anything that I haven't already done.
| fastball wrote:
| The glass is half full.
| jhauris wrote:
| I've felt both ways at different times. Both are true. The fact
| that anything ever works is part of the magic.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| I don't know about most people but devs should have their own
| personal knowledge management system ( do it on any tool,
| notion, evernote..) but it's an absolute must. These facts you
| talk about are fleeting and in the moment the revelations of
| the learnings seem so clear, but 4 weeks and all the little
| details go out the window. Save all your little Linux command
| pipe chains. Config values that worked and few sentences of
| caution to your future self of what to do and not to do.
| Otherwise you're just going to make the same mistakes in an
| years time...
| rektide wrote:
| Can I get a raise of hands for folks who think "Dream
| Machines" is the #1 book on software? How about for those who
| believe that Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect is a
| driving force for humanity? And that software is a radical
| embodiment of that all? I think we can get a modest show of
| hands; I've seen enough confirming points of view from about.
| (Would that I have a memex to highlight all the mentions I've
| seen, all the other endorsements!)
|
| Elsewhere I've talked a bit about whether we are romantically
| engaged in software development. Or whether we are justifying
| ourselves, merely up to fun.
|
| And I think this comment hones in a lot on what the real
| chase of this all is, on where we can be radically romantic &
| hopeful & builders of enduring meaning. It's good advice, for
| just trying to get better. But this act of enhancing
| ourselves, learning, cobbling together pools of wisdom: it's
| the meta-act, it's what software development enables, for
| software & for other areas. A push for excellence. Software
| both requires us to improve ourselves, to learn, but it's
| also a tool for learning, for augmenting ourselves, for
| becoming more than what limited things we might otherwise be
| constrained to develop into.
|
| Working not just with but on personal information systems,
| is, in my view, a nearly sacrosanct act. I see developers
| like Karli Coss[1] as vanguards of humanity, a bringer about
| of higher orders & new ranks of human development, via
| software. Don't merely just use a knowledge management
| system, develop them! This is the core point, the core
| enablement of software, and it's not automation or products
| or ai that has ultimate relevance: it's this human
| development, this getting better at getting better. Invest
| yourself into knowledge management systems, build them to
| further reaches. Pick up really good open source tools like
| Foam (built as a vscode extension!) & build plugins, expand,
| grow! Excel! Keep expanding the reach that your mind can
| travel, by actively engaging yourself in building better
| bicycles of the mind.
|
| [1] https://github.com/karlicoss
|
| [2] https://github.com/foambubble/foam
| LordHumungous wrote:
| So all the difficulties in engineering are due to "dicks" and
| "idiots", unlike like the author who is presumably the only
| clever person in the entire industry. Here is an example of one
| thing I actually don't like about this profession: too many
| emotionally stunted egomaniacs.
| aspaceman wrote:
| Write more code - solve fewer problems.
|
| Engineers solve problems. We use our expertise to take
| stressful and difficult problems and reduce them into simpler
| ones. You cut through bureaucracy and a healthy amount of talky
| bullshit to solve problems. The better you are at this, the
| more you're rewarded as an engineer. But this is a taxing
| process.
|
| Writing code is creative. You find your own problems, and solve
| the ones you want to solve. If you don't want to solve
| something, you let it fester - or nurture it - as you wish.
|
| Take a look at Racket. Read a book about Lisp games
| programming. Find an old C64 and learn some BASIC. Check out
| PICO-8. Or see Inigo's SDF website and try out some shadertoy.
| Ignore practicality, or focus only on your individual
| practicality.
|
| Engineering is a discipline and that makes it tiring over time.
| You don't always have to be improving something.
| pschw wrote:
| > Read a book about Lisp games programming
|
| Any recommendations?
| superbcarrot wrote:
| > because so many of the programs you depend on are written by
| dicks and idiots
|
| Out of all the problems with programming as a job, this is
| around the bottom of my list.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| I'm working on an app that calls other internal services
| inside our company, one of them is a call to update an
| account balance. We were running into this issue where we
| were getting a 504 Gateway Timeout on the update balance call
| so I eventually found the Slack room for that team and asked
| about it.
|
| They ignored me for a couple weeks, but I kept asking and
| eventually someone answered and said yeah you'll get the 504
| Gateway Timeout if you try to update the account balance to
| the same value that it already has.
|
| OK, that makes sense to you? What if there was an actual
| gateway timeout?
|
| You would also get a 504 Gateway Timeout in that case.
|
| They apparently have no plans to modify this service's
| behavior.
|
| I let it go, I just moved on with my life. I did not find
| myself awed or stunned with the mountains of work and talent
| and creativity and foresight and intelligence and luck that
| went into it.
| ywei3410 wrote:
| Oh man, we had a connection with an API recently where if
| you sent it some incorrect data it would just hang. No
| errors, no closing of the connection. Just hang. And ofc
| they don't offer a heartbeat over that channel.
|
| That would still be fine... if the data was static. But
| it's not - and changes are communicated; but not to the
| relevant tech teams.
| infogulch wrote:
| I can guarantee you that 5 other teams rely on that
| specific behavior and don't have the will/independence
| ("budget") to implement that change if the api was fixed.
| Not only that, but if they did make that change, their
| manager would instantly have a handful of directors down
| their throat demanding an explanation why they just added
| work to their teams that are busy with Feature Work (TM).
| reaperducer wrote:
| _don 't have the will/independence ("budget") to
| implement that change_
|
| So, dicks and idiot middle managers. I think you made his
| point.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| No. This is such a small issue who honestly cares if it
| gets fixed? I guarantee you this is not the most
| important thing anyone involved could be working on. Too
| many perfectionists on this website.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| The person who brought up the story mentioned account
| balances. Someone will definitely care when a latent
| combination of bugs is triggered and the company loses
| money because of it. See Knight capital and the more
| recent Citi debacles.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| This is a total failure to follow any sort of standard.
|
| A 504 is a gateway timeout due to the server failing to
| complete the action, hell, a 400-level for "you fucked
| up" would be preferable.
| fastball wrote:
| 4xx would be what you want anyway, no?
| jholman wrote:
| What you described: let x = 2 // runs
| x = 3; // runs x = 3; // runtime error, you
| made a mistake
|
| No, I'd want a balance update to succeed. Even if it's to
| the same value that it already had.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| "We were running into this issue where we were getting a
| 504 Gateway Timeout on the update balance call so I
| eventually found the Slack room for that team and asked
| about it. They ignored me for a couple weeks,...."
|
| Someone could have documented this and/or simply answered
| a damn question instead of wasting _weeks_ of opportunity
| cost. Too many dicks and idiots on that website, it
| seems.
|
| "who honestly cares if it gets fixed" - everyone that
| comes after this and has to deal with it and waste weeks
| of their life trying to pry some required nugget of info
| from a passive aggressive group of maintainers of stuff
| which actively ignores industry standards?
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Too real.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Similarly a colleague just told me yesterday about a data
| vendor who is sending data over on a almost nightly basis.
| They changed the process/format - without notifying anyone
| - and things broke.
|
| End users of my colleague's application were now saying
| they were seeing inactive client data coming up in their
| app, and it was causing confusion.
|
| During the time trying to figure out the new behavior, the
| main client finally got something in writing about "here's
| how it works" from the data vendor...
|
| * Rule 1...
|
| * Rule 2...
|
| * Rule 3: If a client record has not had any data updated,
| we will only send over the client name and header info, but
| no additional data records will be sent over.
|
| * Rule 4....
|
| * Rule 5: If a client record is no longer active in the
| system (for example, has been deleted), we will only send
| over the client name and header info, but no additional
| data records will be sent over.
|
| Questioning back to the original data provider - if we get
| a client name and header info, but no additional data
| records - _what does that mean?_ Does it mean the client is
| inactive /deleted, or simply that they've had no data
| change since yesterday?
|
| Absolutely no coherent response, and I doubt there will be
| one. The defense of "no no, we have to keep stupid
| behaviour around because people _rely_ on it! " doesn't
| even stand - this change came about in the last couple
| weeks, after having worked this way for more than a year.
|
| It's both maddening and frightening how fragile so much
| daily data exchange is.
| jbob2000 wrote:
| Or this:
|
| "Find creative ways around standards, limits, laws, processes,
| morals, etc. so I can make a quick buck and pass you some table
| scraps"
| xwdv wrote:
| Or worse than table scraps: pieces of paper that _may_ be
| worth something someday if _you_ keep working hard enough.
| Bakary wrote:
| The system and forces that make this table scrap
| arrangement possible are the same forces that generally
| drive the salaries and perks of tech workers much higher
| than the average for other professions. It's healthy to be
| cynical but it's also important to look at the overall
| balance of power of the social classes. The 9% versus 90%
| makes more sense than the 99%
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I just treat startup equity as a lottery ticket: but, I
| find the work itself interesting and would be programming
| even if it wasn't my career.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The longer I am in this profession (and it's been over 20
| years) the less I see my peers as "dicks and idiots" but more
| as victims of the same broken game. I work with very smart
| people, to be honest. It's the technology and the employers and
| the culture of development that's the problem.
|
| Retiring sounds good right about now.
| wwww4all wrote:
| I've been wrangling software bytes for a while and I am
| pragmatic about the business.
|
| Software engineering is extremely difficult. High performance
| engineers are rare and valuable. Some times, they become
| jaded and burn out.
|
| This is my career and my craft, so I'm inclined to ride the
| waves and trends in software engineering. Negotiate for above
| average salary while maintaining my tech stack and producing
| at above average output.
|
| Most people don't understand what it takes to develop and
| deploy software solutions. They only see the unicorns like
| Google, Facebook, and think software engineers are common.
| They don't see the vast swaths of land of failed software
| startups and dreams and incompetence in software engineering.
|
| Most people in software engineering doesn't know or
| comprehend basic data structures and algorithms, which form
| basis for all software solutions at scale. Yet, they are
| filled into dev position slots by HR/management and asked to
| develop complex systems.
|
| To have long term career in software engineering is like any
| other trade. Observe how the game is played, learn to play
| the game and play the game right.
|
| A software engineer with basic skill stack and right long
| term view can ride the software wave for decades, just by
| understanding basic CS principles and utilizing them to
| develop solutions. Switch jobs regularly and negotiate hard
| for salary and levels.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Retiring sounds good right about now.
|
| I tried that. After 6 weeks of watching TV I restarted my
| business and went back to work. Retirement is a living death.
| syndacks wrote:
| Hey, thanks for sharing this. Mind expanding? I'm curious
| to hear what you had planned going into retirement and what
| you seek going back to work. Are you right back to the same
| as you were right before "retiring"? Knowing how your first
| round of retirement went, what would you have done
| differently in the years/decades leading up to it?
| WalterBright wrote:
| What I discovered is that a life without purpose is not a
| life. The fun is in having worthwhile goals and striving
| to reach them.
|
| Being passively entertained, bleh. It's also why I have a
| very limited appetite for "see the world" traveling. I
| can only look for so long, then I need to be doing
| something with a purpose.
|
| I've seen what happens when people retire. They suddenly
| get old and lose their vitality. They become boring
| people.
|
| My plan is to work until they carry me out in a box.
| farias0 wrote:
| Maybe the problem is that you spent it watching TV?
| StavrosK wrote:
| Seriously, I was between jobs for a while and it was the
| best time I've had in ages. I could (and would) do random
| projects that struck my fancy all the time, go out, see
| friends, write, design things... It was much more
| productive than a job, and I was constantly doing things
| with the parts of technology that don't suck.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| How so? The job situation for good developers has never been
| better. We can make salaries that would have seemed
| unthinkable two decades ago while working from home and doing
| something we enjoy.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| That's true but that is to offset the really negative
| aspects. How many places never let dev's actually design
| systems that stand up to scrutiny because the execs don't
| care if BS is pumped out because as long as the business
| floats then it doesn't matter.
|
| Then the code base becomes a mass of spaghetti that at this
| point the revolving door of devs have to both figure out
| and keep alive in ever increasingly stressful situations
| until they either burn out or move on for greener pastures
| perpetuating that cycle.
|
| So far in my career the split is 60:30:10 places who don't
| care about actual engineering and run their business on
| crap, those who recognized things are biting them but the
| amount of inertia you need to counteract things and rebuild
| is huge and then the very fine percentage of places that
| actually have a good culture around engineering.
|
| The first is horrible because you're a fungible asset and
| the job is miserable the second is better but still bad
| because at this point they do see you as valuable but
| you're going to be spending your time digging them out of a
| grave and then the third is just a magical experience where
| you're valued and the codebase isn't constantly a light
| breeze away from collapsing.
|
| The majority of the industry is in position 1 and I guess
| we'll see if it ever makes it to 2 or 3.
|
| Worth noting that I made high salaries and could work from
| home in every case but it would be correct to say I
| continue to enjoy programming in spite of the industry.
|
| I also don't think it's a coincidence that companies who
| are in group 3 are typically leagues ahead of 1 and 2.
| blackrock wrote:
| How old are you now? Or what age group are you in now?
|
| It seems like businesses want the expertise of a 20+
| veteran, but want to hire 18 year olds, so they can pay
| them less, and dangle silly trinkets like free cafeteria
| food in front of them.
|
| Oh and, why is it taking so long to work on it?
| notriddle wrote:
| The other problem is that there's factors in a company
| other than, strictly, its engineering culture. I could
| get a good job, in a good engineering culture, working in
| adtech, but as long as I have a choice I'd rather not.
|
| The place I work instead can charitably be described as
| "a victim of regulatory capture," but at least I'm
| working in a business that I believe has a legitimate
| reason to exist.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This has not been my experience. It seems that it's a young
| person's game, and us older folks are not particularly
| encouraged to participate. Frankly, I've been stunned by
| the way in which I was treated, in the short period of time
| I spent looking for work, after leaving my last company.
|
| Thankfully, I am not required to work, and have been having
| the best time I could imagine, since giving up on working
| for others. Instead, I work with people for free, on
| projects that I think are constructive and give back to
| society.
|
| I am working from home, doing something that I enjoy
| tremendously. I'm doing the best work of my life. I just
| got done refactoring a fairly large backend that I wrote a
| couple of years ago, and am actually thrilled at the
| quality (and quantity) of my work. It's driving the
| application that I'm developing. I wasn't satisfied with
| some of the popular offerings, and had already written the
| backend as an exercise, so I used that, instead. It just
| needed a bit of tweaking to fit the new application.
|
| I love programming and system design. I'm really good at
| it. I write code every single day of my life (My GH profile
| is solid green, and it's not "gamed"[0]).
|
| It's just that I found others are not interested in working
| with me. It hurt, as I had spent my entire career, working
| on teams, but I rubbed some dirt on it and walked it off.
| In the aggregate, I'm actually glad that I went through
| that.
|
| [0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff
| wwww4all wrote:
| Companies look for expertise in older software engineers.
|
| They want senior level to help them maintain legacy
| systems or lead the upgrade to latest tech stack.
|
| If backend is your specialty, market oneself as expert in
| backed solutions using latest stack. The fundamental CS
| principles never change. Learn the basics of cloud,
| containers, orchestration, micro services, and inform
| recruiters about experiences delivering solutions in
| latest stack.
|
| The recruiters will be rushing to your profile and
| demanding interview slots.
|
| Good luck.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Actually, frontend is my strength. I've written (and
| shipped) dozens of apps. I'm quite good at "closing" the
| app development process. I've been _shipping_ (as opposed
| to just "coding") applications for over thirty years.
|
| The backend was just a more challenging project. I won't
| go into all the reasons that I wrote it, but it works a
| charm. A dedicated backend engineer could probably do
| better (actually a dedicated backend _team_. I 'm fairly
| productive). I'm just glad I have a use for it. I was
| assuming it would never be used. I wrote it on a lark.
| Took seven months, but it was fun. I do stuff like that.
| A number of years ago, I taught myself to program
| Android, but decided I didn't like it, and never followed
| through.
|
| As far as recruiters...They do rush to my profile. I have
| a lot of nice buzzwords.
|
| As soon as they find out how old I am, though, the call
| suddenly has "connection problems," and I never hear from
| them again.
|
| I've taken to making sure that my age is clear upfront,
| just to save time. It's amusing how quickly they start
| discouraging me. They start by lowballing me, and when I
| make it clear that I would have no problem working for
| low wages (I do it for fun, and I don't really need the
| work), they start trying to find other reasons I wouldn't
| want the job.
|
| Like I said, I bailed on the rat race. It was just making
| me grumpy.
| arjun-menon wrote:
| _> Retiring sounds good right about now._
|
| My personal plan, instead of retiring, is to work on
| inventing solutions to the issues plaguing large and complex
| software projects. One of my primary sub-goals under this
| mission, is to create a new programming language that'll
| handle complexity excellently, while also making it hard for
| a programmer to write bugs in it (strong static type system,
| deep static analysis, thorough linting, some kind of
| automatic proofing or verification, paradigms that make
| writing bugs less likely, paradigms that handle
| modularization and complexity gracefully, etc).
|
| Overall, when there are big problems in the world (poverty,
| human rights abuses, climate change, _bad software_ ), I want
| to try to use my skills and abilities toward solving those
| problems, rather throwing my hands in the air, and giving
| into hopelessness.
| wffurr wrote:
| >> create a new programming language
|
| The problems with software engineering aren't technical.
| They are organizational and political.
| Aqueous wrote:
| with respect i think it's a combination. business demands
| value delivery and features on a constant basis, and
| programmers are constantly layering crap over crap in
| order to deliver. nobody stops and says "hey, wait a
| second - let's pause, and figure out how we're going to
| invest now to make the changes you're asking for easier
| in the future." programmers need to learn to identify
| when this is happening (a technical skill) and demand
| change, and product needs to learn to listen and
| understand the consequences of not heeding this advice.
| because after 5 - 10 years of 100 different people
| working on a given system, the complexity becomes
| unmanageable, and the business grinds to a halt. and then
| heads start to roll. and yet the people demanding the new
| features now are never going to have suffer the
| consequences, because they'll be off to another venture
| in 5 - 10 years.
| Aqueous wrote:
| > programming language that'll handle complexity
| excellently
|
| this more than anything is the issue plaguing development.
| none of the paradigms we have - OOO, functional programming
| - by themselves lend themselves to expressing complex
| logic. and by complex logic i mean the tangled web of
| business or application logic that's inherent in many
| modern software applications, both web and desktop. so you
| end up with hundreds of interdependent classes nested
| within one another, connected in some extremely arcane way,
| and to understand an entire piece of software you have to
| look into 100 different files. this is not acceptable.
|
| I got sick and tired of it at work and just went ahead and
| created a DAG-driven workflow engine, that enforces a
| common interface for individual actions the application may
| need to take, and allows to express complex business logic
| - including conditionals - in a single file. you can glue
| together 10, 20, 30 actions in just 1 file - a description
| of the actions you need to take, not the actions
| themselves. many companies have done this, and yet for some
| reason there is no clear winner in this space.
|
| All of our code instantly become highly testable, self-
| documenting, and easy to understand. But if I hadn't taken
| a massive risk doing it myself, we would have just been
| doing the same garbage in and garbage out process that
| leads us to have to rewrite an entire business every 10
| years, once the complexity becomes unmanageable.
|
| why isn't this the standard?
| Delk wrote:
| > It's the technology and the employers and the culture of
| development that's the problem.
|
| What is it about those things that you find to be the
| problem?
|
| Genuinely asking.
| convolvatron wrote:
| i can take a whack -
|
| no one works as a team anymore. everyone gets their
| project, and they sometimes chat about it, but the whole
| group dynamic has been lost. this is huge. it almost
| guarantees that someone is pissed off because they dont
| have a voice. and that at least two developers are working
| at cross purposes. that someone is off diligently working
| on their piece without a real understanding of where it
| fits in.
|
| in the absence of group coordination, there generally is
| little or no technical management to prop up the group.
| requirements are dumped on engineering without the valuable
| back and forth about what makes sense (and how or why)
|
| no one tests anymore. we've all decided that those 8 units
| that the cicd runs on every commit is somehow adequate.
| alot of places dont even try to triage bugs anymore or even
| keep information in tickets so that someone down the line
| might figure it out
|
| no one plans anymore. there is no more grand arc of the
| project. we just do what we can get done this sprint, and
| pick up a little work for the next one.
|
| no one reads anymore. technical design discourse used to be
| the most important thing to do. now if you write up a
| draft, no one really wants to read or discuss it beyond
| grammar corrections
|
| same for reviews - i've been at organizations where every
| PR was a chance to really get into the design choices and
| the tradoffs. now you're lucky to get some useless style
| comments
|
| the scope is radically reduced. what used to be a glorious
| exercise in world building is now reduced to a choice of
| which large modules to use and the application of just
| enough glue to stick them together.
|
| no one feels responsible anymore. the project is a mess.
| i've got my part and I'm doing the best I can.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Retiring sounds good right about now._
|
| I'm with you. If I had another skill, I'd give up computers
| entirely. Maybe have a smartphone, and that's it. But only
| for limited use.
|
| I wish I could build things with my hands, or play an
| instrument, or just be good at something else, and let the
| tech world pass me by. I used to love technology because it
| was fun and interesting. It's no longer either of those
| things.
| blackrock wrote:
| A lot of people seem to just create YouTube videos of their
| woodworking skills. Building drawers, cabinets, anything.
| They just drone away at it, but because it's so visual, and
| you get a cacophony of random noises, that it makes for a
| good YouTube candidate.
|
| Maybe you can segue into that?
|
| Or maybe you can build and test drones. And the noise from
| the spinning propellers adds to the mystique of robotics
| development.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I know it's the biggest cliche in the world, but the grass
| isn't always greener on the other side. Lots of musicians
| wish they had a skill that let them sit at a desk all day
| and get a stable paycheck.
|
| Not saying you have to keep working in tech forever, but I
| don't think it's objectively stopped being fun and
| interesting.
| cjsawyer wrote:
| I think the "trick" is to find a fulfilling non computer
| based hobby
| Osiris wrote:
| I agree. I don't do side projects, I do BJJ and ride
| motorcycles. Those things keep me from getting burned out
| on coding.
| frereubu wrote:
| Absolutely. Every friend I talk to, from central bankers
| to dramaturgs, has regrets about the career they chose.
| It generally breaks down into where they are on the
| spectrum from (a) they wish their job was more creative
| to (b) they wish they had more money to live comfortably.
| I know almost no-one who is content that they've found a
| happy medium, and the few that do have done so through
| blind luck.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| An alternate perspective to this is. The great line of
| thought, that you are meant to 'follow your passion' and
| discover your true calling. There is a job mean for you
| and you just need to find it.
|
| I disagree with this and feel this thinking makes peoples
| lives miserable thinking they're somehow wasting their
| lives and makes people take plunges in life that they
| later regret.
|
| I feel there is space for an attitude that, to learn a
| craft you need to toil and master it with deep dedication
| and practice. Mastery, will bring with it naturally that
| joy that we seek.
|
| I think if people consider their craft as bigger than
| themselves, with an attitude of humility and learning
| they will get the happiness and satisfaction of building
| things. Rather than seeking a job that's somehow obliged
| to give you that happiness juice..
| shagie wrote:
| There's a blog post from a CS Professor that I stumbled
| across a bit ago - Find The Hard Work You're Willing To
| Do - http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/mont
| hly/2018...
|
| Its short, only a few short paragraphs - but it has one
| key piece that I've found myself oft quoting to people:
|
| > Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to
| "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract
| to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find
| the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do
| you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to
| be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration
| do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you
| figure things out? Answers to these very practical
| questions might help you find a place where you can build
| an interesting and rewarding life.
|
| > I realize that "Find your passion" makes for a more
| compelling motivational poster than "What hard problems
| do you enjoy working on?" (and even that's a lot better
| than "What kind of pain are you willing to endure?"), but
| it might give some people a more realistic way to
| approach finding their life's work.
|
| --
|
| I enjoy software development - and I do so because I
| enjoy solving those problems. To me, software development
| is like being paid to solve sudoku puzzles all day long
| (and yes, I watch cracking the cryptic from time to
| time)... well, at least when I'm not in meetings.
|
| One of the important skills that I now realize that the
| dreaded math classes that I disliked (integrations and
| eigenvectors - ugh) was about the skill of continuing to
| solve the problem rather than giving up (and searching
| for the answer). Yes, there's a place for people who go
| to the back of the book or Stack Overflow for the
| solution - but many haven't learned the hard skill of
| continuing to solve the problem when its not easy.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| These ideas are from the book "be so good they can't
| ignore you" cal newport
| overscore wrote:
| For almost exactly the same reasons as discussed above, I'm
| in the process of trying to move from software development
| to medicine. I'm currently a pre-hospital medical
| practitioner and work part-time in that field. My pay
| averages over the last year averages between 1/20th to
| 1/25th (0.05 to 0.04 times) my hourly pay as a software
| development consultant.
|
| I'm now trying to decide whether I should attempt a medical
| degree to become a doctor. It will take ~7 years, a lot of
| unpaid study and work during that time, and after 10 years,
| if I'm lucky enough to become a consultant hospital doctor,
| I'll still be paid less than I am now, both per hour and
| per annum. As I'm in my late 30's with a mortgage and
| family who are dependent on me, it's a big, big commitment
| and risk to take.
|
| Still, I vastly prefer my time spent with my pre-hospital
| medical colleagues and with patients to that which I spend
| working in software. I get an incredible amount of "life
| satisfaction", or whatever you might call the sentiment,
| for this part of my professional life - the only other time
| that comes close is my time in the military.
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| I'm thinking of going back to school for Biology, but not
| sure. Have been thinking about it for a few years
| (getting older, seeing people around falling ill, and now
| the pandemic). Ultimately in Bioinformatics or Genomics.
| At least I can still utilize my technology knowledge than
| start from 0.
|
| Also, the pay is less than a normal software developer.
| overscore wrote:
| I am extremely empathetic with you on the decision you
| have to make.
|
| I am well aware that software developers on the whole
| have much better than average remuneration, so it's
| understandable that positions in other fields will
| attract lesser pay. However, another point which I didn't
| labour above (because I'm not sure if it's universal or
| in my own country only) is that student and junior
| doctors are expected to work absurd hours, often double
| the 48 hour per average week limit set by the EU Working
| Time Directive.
|
| I'm currently (as in right now taking a break from)
| studying for the HPAT standardised test in my country in
| preparation for applying for medicine in the coming
| academic year. Although it's not particularly complex,
| I'm aware that if I had spent the time that I dedicated
| to my EMT qualification and now the HPAT, I probably
| could have added hundreds of thousands to my annual
| income as opposed to a decade of ~EUR15 ph labour.
|
| This isn't so much a reply to you at this point as a
| lament about medical care is undervalued. I'm a competent
| software developer at best.
| FpUser wrote:
| I've been programming for about 40 years. Had ups and downs.
| But I mostly worked on creating new products (not always
| purely software). Also been on my own for the most part. In
| the end. I love it and I hate it. I love it because it let me
| express myself and it is a great feeling when you see others
| using your products. I hate it because there is always way
| too much non creative work and general BS around but that's
| life.
|
| But generally I enjoy it and are not planning retirement.
| Will just maybe work less.
| [deleted]
| ljm wrote:
| Peopleware, Mythical Man Month, Five Dysfunctions of a Team,
| and similar classic texts were all written decades ago.
|
| It's been over forty years and many organisations haven't
| learned a damn thing from it. I don't blame developers for
| it, there are no dicks and idiots involved here.
|
| Read one of those books now and it will still feel like an
| epiphany.
| leetrout wrote:
| You are very correct.
|
| I think they all have weak spots but any one of those will
| indeed illuminate one on how broken pretty much every place
| is. I'd like to try working at bridgewater where there are
| less games played.
|
| One thing I've noticed is pretty much nowhere wants to
| acknowledge and act on employees emotions (for better or
| worse).
|
| I love this comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16603929
|
| And this article is pretty good:
|
| http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/5289.html
| RickS wrote:
| > victims of the same broken game. I work with very smart
| people, to be honest.
|
| Couldn't agree more. I'm an SDE1.5 at best, working with a
| guy that's probably a 3.5. Writes code that's way over my
| head sometimes, and always well-tested and elegant.
|
| Lately I've been helping him by debugging issues in eg
| tsconfig and various JS build fuckery, and it's been both a
| relief and a surprise that even really brilliant people
| struggle with a lot of the same stuff I do. It's not (just)
| that I'm stupid and unintuitive - the tools are too, even for
| experienced engineers.
| amenod wrote:
| Of course they are. They are written by people and often
| become standard because of good marketing instead of merit.
|
| However, I still find satisfaction in learning new things,
| trying to be better each day, overcoming new and more
| challenging problems and solving riddles in a nicer and
| more elegant way. I fail in all these things, too, of
| course - but it does give me a sense of purpose. And I
| don't appreciate any tool that comes my way, I'm picky that
| way. I love Python for its stdlib, React for its
| declarative nature, C for its simplicity... and avoid
| dealing with the JS build system of the month as much as I
| can. Enough to understand, but I try not to lose too much
| time and mental energy on them.
|
| That said, if I didn't enjoy programming, I would be happy
| to move to management or even leave the industry to become
| a carpenter. I think that as long as you do something
| meaningful and also help other people (so that you can live
| off it), it doesn't matter much what that thing is.
| medium_burrito wrote:
| Retirement sounds amazing.
|
| What really gets me is my employers hiring engineers for
| $500k per seat and they can memorize their way through
| Leetcode interviews but can't even structure small programs
| in a modular, easy to understand way, and when it comes to
| larger pieces of software, it's complete chaos.
| taf2 wrote:
| I'm 20 years in as well... I think it's still fun... it's
| just a game of fixing things... the other game about how
| people interact is not as fun but still kinda interesting...
| game on old friend
| mgkimsal wrote:
| "it's just a game of fixing things"
|
| 25+ years in, I get little joy/fun from constantly 'fixing
| things' that shouldn't have needed fixing (or nearly as
| much fixing) had people planned ahead, or communicated, or
| tested, or just _listened_ to the people they 'd hired that
| _do_ these things (plan /communicate/test/etc).
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I feel both, depending on how my day is going. They're both
| true.
| ggm wrote:
| Code which matters is like mathematics. It can be reasoned about,
| has respect for formalisms, may be subject to proof or inductive
| reasoning. It heads to things like type checking. I've never
| written any code like this. I often doubt I can.
|
| Everything else is either ephemeral, or scripting, or should only
| waiting to be subject to tests against formalisms. Lots of things
| are broken in code which should not be btw.
| willeh wrote:
| Truly fantastic stuff. I don't really have anything to add other
| than to say that this made me feel happy about what I do for a
| living. So much better than reading flamewars camouflaged as
| blogposts :)
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| I dont really understand the point of this article. Literally any
| system can be made romantic for the sheer fact that everything
| has spent hundreds of man-hours building up to it.
|
| The cheapest possible ballpoint pen is made up of years of
| research into the plastics, the machinery required to create
| bearings with the tolerances necessary, the exact chemical makeup
| of the ink etc etc. It just seems to be a waste of brain-space to
| bother with making everything romantic.
| olav wrote:
| It becomes rather interesting in my mind the moment you think
| about when the thing no longer exists.
|
| We loose so many things all the time, the ability to _make_
| stuff, the ability to repair things, even the use of drills and
| hammers quickly fades away for the TikTok generation.
|
| I love the notion of the OP and applaud initiatives like the
| various Smalltalks or https://gpblocks.org/ that try to keep
| the awe in our craft alive.
| mb7733 wrote:
| You think that young people don't use hammers?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if most Gen Z people had never
| picked up a hammer in their life (Speaking as a Gen Z
| myself).
| typest wrote:
| Yes, the construction of a ballpoint pen could be made
| romantic. But I mean...it's pretty incredible how many humans
| collaborate to produce the ballpoint pen, millions of
| individuals cooperating in countless ways, producing an
| essential implement which is greater than the sum of its parts.
| No one involved could tell you exactly how the pen is made, and
| yet it's sold at a price so low we never think about it. There
| is a famous essay "I, Pencil" that details, and indeed
| romanticizes, this exact process.
|
| You could cynically state that all aspects of civilization are
| incredible, so therefore nothing is. Or you could back up and
| marvel at the fact that out of nothing came something, out of
| an unthinking universe came self aware humans that _literally
| took rocks out of the ground and reconstructed them so that
| they would think for us_ , and that we then used those
| thinking-rocks to cure diseases, enable near-instantaneous
| communication anywhere in the world, and literally launch
| people off this planet.
|
| I would advise you to try thinking in the latter style, as life
| is more fun that way.
| eigenhombre wrote:
| An upside of programming is that you can build something
| useful, by yourself. Some of my favorite programs are ones I
| wrote and use every day. They're not amazing programs, but
| they do the job and they did not exist before I wrote them.
|
| I wonder if a home-created ballpoint pen, that worked well,
| wouldn't feel a bit more magical or romantic than the one you
| get for free at the hotel or bank. Having made, for example,
| my own paint, prior to use, I can attest that doing so feels
| "magical" in a similar way that programming does.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| Sometimes it makes me dizzy - you pick up some ordinary
| thing, and suddenly marvel at all the people, all the work
| and effort, that goes into making the most mundane things.
| Odes to Common Things is a reminder of how amazing the
| universe is - the natural and the things we create.
|
| "A book, a book full of human touches, of shirts, a book
| without loneliness, with men and tools, a book is victory."
| -- Pablo Neruda, Odes to Common Things
| elliottkember wrote:
| > It just seems to be a waste of brain-space to bother with
| making everything romantic.
|
| Is dancing is a waste of energy?
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| For me, yes complete waste of time and energy
| yesenadam wrote:
| "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though
| nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is."
| haskellandchill wrote:
| Romantic? A relationship can be a metaphor for almost anything.
| Currently I feel abused not by programming but by other
| programmers. How can you be romantic about programmers? (more
| broadly: How can you be romantic about people?) I agree with the
| title paradoxically.
| grawprog wrote:
| Seeing as i'm not as jaded yet as many of the other commenters
| here towards programming, maybe I can give my views.
|
| I understand what the author's getting at pretty simply, it's
| pretty awesome to write some words...lots and lots of words...and
| you create 'something'.
|
| It's sort of the same romance that say would surround something
| like
|
| A carpenter that builds homes from start to finish
|
| Or a mechanic that builds super cars in their garage
|
| I think it's that same thing
|
| The lone programmer hacking away building something awesome
|
| Unfortunately, like the 'romance' of most things, the reality is
|
| That carpenter's working on a crew of 100 people building yet
| another cooking cutter townhouse
|
| That mechanic works a day job at a shop and spends more time
| paying bills and dealing with customers
|
| And...that programmer
|
| They're part of a team debugging some server code somewhere that
| a bank or accounting firm relies on or something
|
| Sometimes though, I find it helps just to stop and think of
| things romantically from time to time, even if you're
| disillusioned.
|
| By the time I left my prior job, I was kind of fed up with it.
| But even then there was two ways I could look at it.
|
| I could be
|
| 'A CNC programmer in a granite shop making countertops and
| fireplaces for rich people'
|
| Or
|
| 'I turned mountains into high end furniture using large machines
| in a trade that stretches back to the farthest history of
| humanity.'
|
| Looking at it the second way helped on those days you just really
| didn't want to be there.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Consider it an ephemeral craft to accomplish goals, whether
| business or otherwise. Code will never be perfect and most of it
| is a mess. Someone can explore Pony, Idris, or make an Arduino to
| ring a cowbell on the weekend.
| einpoklum wrote:
| How? By looking at the codebase I'm working with right now,
| that's how.
| 3princip wrote:
| I've found being too attached to code is a recipe for frustration
| in the workplace. You code something elegant, simple, dare I say
| beautiful and inevitably it will be butchered by new product
| requirements, business needs, that quick hack to satisfy a client
| or more generally uncaring colleagues who are looking to get
| their job done as quickly as possible.
|
| Perhaps romantic aspects could only be achieved when there are no
| third parties, just the programmer and their code. Working in or
| more importantly leading a team mandates a different approach by
| putting aside aesthetic considerations for more pragmatic ones
| that will satisfy all parties involved.
|
| It's hard to be romantic in corporate environments.
| psalminen wrote:
| This reminded me of something that happened last week. I had
| written some code I found absolutely beautiful, then had to
| delete an hour later since the customer's requirements had
| changed. Personally, I find these situations disheartening but
| it's never frustrated me.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Why delete it?
|
| Tuck it away for later use. If somebody wanted it enough to
| ask for it in a formal way, someone else would probably find
| it useful.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| If your code gets butchered it is not that great. That's
| something I am slowly learning, and by slowly I mean in the
| scale of decades.
|
| I've seen some of my old code I wrote in the workplace ten
| years ago, going through the hands of many developers of
| various skill levels and with different ideas, and then getting
| back to me. Needless to say, it is pretty ugly.
|
| Analyzing that, I found the real good parts mostly untouched.
| The parts that I though were great when I wrote them and make
| me feel ashamed today usually didn't hold up. The most
| butchered parts tend to be of the overly abstract kind.
| Interestingly, some of the complicated and clever stuff that
| most people advise against did well. If it does the job well,
| people will keep it and put it to good use.
|
| You can code romantically in the workplace. You just have to
| realize your code will be under attack and it has to be strong
| enough to defend itself. Weak code is not beautiful anyways, so
| in the end, all that adversity will help make your code better
| and more beautiful.
| 3princip wrote:
| I agree with your points with a couple of caveats. I've
| written a lot of terrible code. For the good stuff it's
| usually not the existing lines of code or structure that are
| butchered rather the additions which do not follow the spirit
| of the original code. That ranges from trivialities such as
| code style of another developer or more serious issues of
| making a mess to fit a completely orthogonal new requirement,
| not utilizing existing functionality rather just doing
| similar things in different ways etc. In such cases a small
| refactor would suffice but that almost never happens due to
| time constraints.
|
| On the topic of overly complex stuff not being touched, I
| find that's usually because no one understands it and hence
| others refrain from touching it lest it break.
| cambalache wrote:
| > There's a scene in Moneyball in which Brad Pitt's character,
| the manager of the Oakland A's
|
| This is how you know the article was written by an European.
| Billy Bean is of course the GM, not the manager, a subtle and
| pedantic, but very important difference in baseball clubs job
| titles.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| Strange. For me, programming is an emotionless endeavor and one
| of the hardest aspects about doing it day in and day out.
|
| Sometimes it feels like a higher level form of data entry.
| eigenhombre wrote:
| This interests me. What kind of programming do you do?
|
| Emotion is very important to me as a programmer. Often my
| emotions know when something isn't right before my "rational"
| mind does, hinting that it's time to slow down and dig deeper.
| I've found a number of bugs this way over the years.
|
| In fact, my team has long recorded our emotional state with
| every commit, with a numerical score: "h:1" through "h:5" at
| the end of each commit message. If you pair on the commit, the
| lowest individual score prevails. Anything other than a five is
| a sign that something deserves a little reflection. (Threes or
| lower are quite rare, happily.) We always said we were going to
| use these as metrics for defect analysis, but our defect rate
| is already pretty low. I suspect the main value is just that
| short pause for reflection before we commit.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I've never considered using qualitative methods on code like
| that, but the aesthetics definitely highlight where some of
| the worst bugs lurk.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| > Emotion is very important to me as a programmer. Often my
| emotions know when something isn't right before my "rational"
| mind does, hinting that it's time to slow down and dig
| deeper. I've found a number of bugs this way over the years.
|
| Sounds like intuition rather than emotions.
| eigenhombre wrote:
| Yes, but I rely on my emotions to tell me when my intuition
| has something to pay attention to.
| dsego wrote:
| > There are lines of code floating around on our computers that
| haven't been executed by a machine in years and probably won't be
| for another lifetime. Others are the golden threads of this
| world, holding it together at the seams without no more than a
| dozen people knowing about it. Remove one of these and it all
| comes crashing down.
|
| Beautifully said, although I find it rather horrifying.
| imbnwa wrote:
| But this is what Taleb and Zizek have been drawing attention to
| for years, its just that this predicament is the case at every
| level of society
| rcgorton wrote:
| many MANY reasons VPs who insist on micro-managing technical
| decisions even though they really do ignore technical
| recommendations of highly skilled engineers. (Tom Hamilton,
| formerly of Digital Guardian)<br> VPs who refuse to share
| technical aspects of the business plans/goals (for a small
| company) with engineering because "well I can't share that with
| you" Steve Weingart when @ Liant<br> Anything
| involving/supervised by Ben Bar-Haim formerly AMD. Ben
| successfully constructed an incredibly monolithic bureaucracy in
| AMD - with a huge amount of overhead. Software groups not based
| in Markham Ontario got Trashed. <br> So yes, lots of Manager/VP
| reasons to hate programming
| fctorial wrote:
| I like the new theme of programmingcirclejerk. Looks exactly like
| hacker news.
| mns06 wrote:
| It's an interesting question: which are the lines of code most
| frequently executed in the world today?
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| My wild ass guess would be one of: a) some high frequency
| trading algo, b) ray tracing/collision detection in popular
| game engines, c) the inner loop of google's spider, d)
| something common to mobile devices (maybe something in wifi or
| cell service?), or (most likely) e) the bitcoin hash algo.
|
| It makes for an interesting "how many manholes in Manhattan"
| interview question, and how you could possibly quantify your
| guesses...
|
| Imagine being the author of those lines of code, if it was
| possible to figure out :-)
| burntoutfire wrote:
| I'd add TCP stack in Linux (kernel). Should be hammered
| constantly on servers of the world and also gets lots of
| usage on smartphones and IoT stuff.
| abc_lisper wrote:
| Nope. IO would be orders of magnitude less than computation
| rcgorton wrote:
| strcpy, strlen, strchr, memcpy, and their varients
| panic wrote:
| My money is on Linux's cpu_idle_loop().
| amelius wrote:
| Don't forget bitcoin::compute_hash()
| yellowbanana wrote:
| I would guess that it is something mobile related. Android?
| titzer wrote:
| I've been programming since my early teens > 25 years ago. The
| article asks "How can you not be romantic about programming"? And
| I have to say, that after all these years, I am romantic about
| programming...only sometimes, now.
|
| For one, programming a lot made me very near-sighted, and my eyes
| are dry to the point that I can no longer wear contacts. (I had a
| bad episode and nearly went blind a couple years back.) That
| really blows, because I used to like surfing and other outdoor
| activities that are seriously curtailed by thick glasses. Take
| care of your eyes!
|
| Second, I am mostly not romantic about programming because I feel
| like I am swimming against the tide most of the time. Stuff
| changes so fast and so much; there is so much fad and passing
| fashions, and what's the rage these days is tomorrow's cargo
| cult. What's today's cargo cult started as an offhand comment
| with a kernel of truth that far too many people took far too
| seriously. It's never the right things that change, either. We
| keep changing syntax and IDEs and environments and frameworks,
| and yet we're still fighting memory management bugs in 2021. A
| very stubborn cult of performance worshippers have successfully
| defended the bottom layers of software from being rewritten in
| safe languages (putting safety at priority #1 for 4+ decades).
| I'm willing to pay 15% performance for this layer to just be
| forever ridden of this, but people treat me like an alien.
|
| Third, people have complained about programmers being lazy and
| wasteful since the beginning of time, but we've truly jumped the
| shark. Build times for C++ (and Rust) are just insane. To think,
| dozens of cores, cranking away for minutes at a time, trillions
| upon trillions upon trillions of calculations just to output a
| little binary. Being a compiler person, and knowing some details
| about what is going on inside those compilers makes me want to
| cry. It's _insanely_ wasteful.
|
| Fourth, the arguing. There have been tribes and flamewars and a
| toxic culture since forever, but really, it feels so hard to
| express how disappointed I am in the whole shit, without adding
| to the whole shit and making the whole atmosphere even worse. I
| vacillate between wanting to yell at clouds and being sick of
| hearing people yelling at clouds! I'm simultaneously sick of
| being shouted at and on the edge of being shouting mad!
|
| But, there are bright spots. CPUs are insanely fast, and there is
| memory enough for everything. Stuff crashes less. But yeah,
| everything is a tangle and huger heap of shit than ever.
| KDJohnBrown wrote:
| Cash rules everything around me.
|
| After a few decades of relying on coding to feed my family, I
| miss the way it felt magical, writing in Basic on a ti 99/4a.
|
| I thought I was going to tell computers to do wonderous things.
| In reality most of us are telling them to serve ads or sell crap
| to people. Most of the rest of us are telling them to serve data
| to companies doing the above.
|
| It's just business now, nothing more.
| bumbada wrote:
| For me programming is all of those but also boring and
| frustrating and gets on my way to get things done.
|
| Creating things nobody ever have done before is one of the
| deepest feelings you can feel in this life when you have done
| that, but also is terrifying emotion while you are doing it.
|
| Like a chemical reaction, for something to be deeply satisfying
| from an emotional point of view you first need to give the system
| enough energy for the reaction to happen.
|
| It requires intense focus, that is deciding not to do other
| things, which is painful. It is slow, which is frustrating. The
| work that could not be automated is boring. It is very expensive
| if you hire others to help you, and involve a tremendous risk if
| after all the work, it doesn't work out.
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